Block 840,000: Bitcoin Halving Day

While the mighty dollar can be printed whenever the US needs more money — Bitcoin is finite. Overall, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin so that there is only 21 million bitcoins (BTC), and all of these will minted by 2140. This is achieved by providing a supply of Bitcoin into the market but holding some back. The new coins are then minted as a reward to miners, and thus we increase the number of bitcoins in the market for the creation of a new block. This happens around every 10 minutes. Thus if a bitcoin is worth 6.25 BTC, then there would be around 900 new bitcoins produced per day.

For mining, the process is competitive, and where there is a strong incentive for miners to build a block. This is done by setting them a puzzle to find a nonce value for the current block, which creates an overall hash value with a number of preceding zero values. For Block 839,999 [here], we get a hash of:

0000000000000000000172014ba58d66455762add0512355ad651207918494ab

The nonce value used to create this is 3,205,594,798, and was found by SBI Crypto.

Halving Day

And, so it happened. On 20 April 2024 at 1:09, Bitcoin block 840,000 was created, and which halved the reward given to miners: